The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) gave the green light to Station Stops, an app with handy time tables, after having it yanked from iTunes for intellectual property claims against the developer.
Station Stops, which costs $2.99, is back in the Apple store this week.
It’s a major victory for the developer/blogger/commuter Chris Schoenfeld, who saw his work pulled from iTunes in August and on the receiving end of a nastygram from MTA lawyers.
The app provides a timetable for the Metro-North Railroad for regularly-scheduled trains departing and arriving from Grand Central Station.
Schoenfeld ran into trouble with the MTA because although they provide schedules to Google Transit, they do not release the data publicly. To build his app, Schoenfeld did it the old way — by entering data manually from the published public schedule.
More on how the MTA saw the light after the jump.
From the press release:
“The conflict between MTA and StationStops was a necessary evil in order to publicly discuss the issues involving MTA’s representation of its intellectual property in the swiftly evolving mobile space,” said Schoenfeld, founder and developer of StationStops.
“MTA has publicly stated that it wishes to reconsider its approach to mobile application development and I applaud them for this turnaround. This has been accompanied by additional gestures of meaningful action, but there is still much more to be done. The MTA is a massive transit service with serious budgetary concerns and…is sorely lacking in real-time information delivery to its customers. By simply publishing their existing schedule database and other information online, as other major transit agencies have done, outside developers have the ability to fill massive gaps in real-time customer information for MTA at little or no cost – in a timeframe MTA could never realize internally.”
Now, if we can just do something about Dublin’s free bike sharing app, pulled recently for the similar dumb reasons.
